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Tough-on-drugs policy 'pointless' - Says Ex-Civil Servant

Britain's policy of being tough on drugs is "pointless", says a former civil servant who once ran the Cabinet's anti-drugs unit.
Julian Critchley now believes the best way to reduce the harm to society from drugs would be to legalise them.
Mr Critchley, who worked with ex-Labour drug tsar Keith Hellawell, said many he had worked alongside felt the same.
They publicly backed government policy but privately believed it was not doing any good, he said. War on drugs
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme in a media-driven age it was difficult to present a case on what was a complex issue.

He said: "It's much easier to come out with soundbites about being tough on drugs and continuing to crack down on drug dealers when in actual fact we know that doesn't work."

Ten years ago, the Cabinet Office's Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit was at the heart of the war on drugs in the UK, co-ordinating policy across all government departments.
Mr Hellawell, the controversial former police chief who went on to accuse Labour ministers of "closing their eyes" to the drugs problem, was appointed in 1998 as the public face of the government's war on drugs. Mr Critchley worked behind the scenes as the unit's director.
In a response to an entry about drugs on BBC home editor Mark Easton's blog, the former senior civil servant wrote that when he started work in the field he did not favour decriminalisation, but as time went on he changed his mind.
"I joined the unit more or less agnostic on drugs policy, being personally opposed to drug use, but open-minded about the best way to deal with the problem. I was certainly not inclined to decriminalise," he said.
But he soon came to the view that enforcement of the law was "largely pointless" and had "no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs", he said. Market 'saturated'
Mr Critchley went on to argue that wishing drug use away was "folly" and that there was "no doubt" there would be a fall in crime as a result of legalisation.

"The argument always put forward against this is that there would be a commensurate increase in drug use as a result of legalisation," he said.
"This, it seems to me, is a bogus point: tobacco is a legal drug, whose use is declining, and precisely because it is legal, its users are far more amenable to government control, education programmes and taxation than they would be were it illegal." Studies showed the market was already almost saturated with drugs, he said, and anyone who wished to purchase the drug of their choice could already do so.
"The idea that many people are holding back solely because of a law which they know is already unenforceable is simply ridiculous," he said.
He also said the "overwhelming majority of professionals" he met, including those from the police, the health service, government and voluntary sectors, held the same view.
"Yet publicly, all those intelligent, knowledgeable people were forced to repeat the nonsensical mantra that the government would be 'tough on drugs', even though they all knew that the government's policy was actually causing harm."

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The former head of the government's UK anti-drug co-ordination unit (UKADCU), Julian Critchley, posted to BBC Home Affairs correspondent Mark Easton's blog last week, The War on Drugs, calling for the legalisation of drugs. In his post he also reports how those he met during his time at the unit knew that criminalisation was causing more harm than the drugs themselves. (This comes as no surprise to anyone who has read the damning report from the prime minister's strategy unit from 2003.)
Critchley says:

I think what was truly depressing about my time in UKADCU was that the overwhelming majority of professionals I met, including those from the police, the health service, government and voluntary sectors held the same view: the illegality of drugs causes far more problems for society and the individual than it solves. Yet publicly, all those intelligent, knowledgeable people were forced to repeat the nonsensical mantra that the Government would be 'tough on drugs', even though they all knew that the Government's policy was actually causing harm.
​

Critchley is to be congratulated for speaking out with such candour on the issue. I have met many former and current civil servants who are of the same opinion, but haven't gone public. What Critchley makes absolutely clear is that many, if not most of those working in the drugs field are knowingly colluding with a regime that actively causes harm. Their silence is not based on ignorance but is tacit support for one of the great social policy disasters of the last 100 years.
Critchley, having retrained as a teacher, concludes with the following:

I find that when presented with the facts, the students I teach are quite capable of considering issues such as this, and reaching rational conclusions even if they started with a blind Daily Mail-esque approach. I find it a shame that no mainstream political party accords the electorate the same respect.
​

His final comment ought to send a shiver down the spine of every UK voter. If you voted in the last election, you probably voted for prohibition. You voted to gift hundreds of billions of pounds to organised crime each year, to undermine the social and economic development of producer countries such as Colombia, Afghanistan as well as transit countries such as Guinea Bissau and Jamaica. You voted to double the amount of acquisitive crime in the UK and to double the prison population with it. Your "X" contributed to misery and degradation for millions of the most marginalised people on earth. Unless we all do something to change it, you will probably vote for prohibition next time too.
In 2003 at a press conference, I asked the then drugs spokesperson at the Home Office, Bob Ainsworth MP, whether the government would support a cost benefit analysis of drug law enforcement. Quick as a flash his reply came back: "Why would we want to do that unless we were going to legalise drugs?" Does that sound like a man ignorant of where that audit trail would lead?
It is the candour of the likes of Critchley and others that exposes the hypocrisy of those failing to speak out and makes prohibition untenable in the long term. As Joseph McNamara, former police chief of Kansas City and San Jose put it: "The drug war cannot stand the light of day. It will collapse as quickly as the Vietnam war, as soon as people find out what's really going on." Tragically and despicably, the government's commitment to populist posturing means that the collapse will come far too late for many.

In most people's minds perhaps, the front line troops in the fight against drugs are police on our streets.
The political rhetoric focuses on the need for robust enforcement - zero tolerance and tough sanctions for dealers and users. But what if it doesn't actually work? What if it actually makes the situation worse? Well, those are questions posed by today's report from the independent think tank the UK Drugs Policy Commission [pdf 632KB].
Despite hundreds of millions of pounds spent each year on UK drug enforcement activity, the commissioners argue there is "remarkably little evidence of its effectiveness". Drug markets, they conclude, are "extremely resilient" and all the criminal justice activity has had "little street-level impact".
Indeed they go further, warning that law enforcement efforts can have a significant negative impact.
Such conclusions are reached by looking at the illicit drug market as a business. It is, they say, one of the most lucrative of its type in the world - worth an estimated £5.3bn - equivalent to a third of the entire tobacco market and over 40% of the alcohol industry.
They estimate there are 300 major drug importers, 30,000 wholesalers and 70,000 street dealers on the streets of the UK.
Currently a quarter of the UK government's drug strategy budget is spent on reducing the supply of these illegal substances - £380m in 2005/6. What impact has that had?
"Law enforcement efforts have had little adverse effect on the availability of illicit drugs in the UK" say the commissioners Seizures of Class A drugs have more than doubled in a decade but average street prices, they claim, have fallen consistently for heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis.
"The drug networks are highly fluid, adapting effectively to law enforcement interventions", says the report. If supplies are hit for a time they simply reduce the purity level of their product increasing their profit margins.
The commission accepts that supply reduction has an important part to play in harm reduction but using the criminal justice system to do it may be making matters worse.
Police crackdowns can, they say, increase threats to public health and safety by altering the behaviour of individual drug users and potentially setting up violent drug gang conflicts as dealers move to new areas.
It is in many ways a bleak assessment of the government's entire approach to the drugs problem. Not only do they question the ineffectiveness of police activity but there is also criticism of that other key plank of the official drug strategy - treatment.
They suggest the programme suffers from high attrition rates, low completion rates, inconsistent quality and availability of services.
So what are the answers?
The UKDPC do not call for legalisation or decriminalisation overtly, but they do point out that while "the illegal status of drugs is likely to have contained their availability and use to some extent...drug laws do not appear to have direct effects on the prevalence of drug use: 'tougher' enforcement measures have not necessarily deterred use".
Instead of filling prisons with thousands of low-level dealers from sink estates, the UKDPC proposes a more targeted approach - forming local partnerships to channel users into treatment, working with communities to help them become more resilient to drugs, disrupting open street-level markets which affect community confidence but not simply driving the drug gangs elsewhere.
To some extent, the harm reduction message has already been accepted. The Director General of Serious Organised Crime Agency Bill Hughes recently told MPs: "in the past too much emphasis has been placed on lower level street deals. What we are trying to deal with are the major importers."
The drug strategy for England and Wales published last April makes remarkably few claims for the effectiveness of police crackdowns.
While citing "robust enforcement" as a key plank of their approach, evidence that it actually works is limited to a few lines: "There is some evidence that enforcement activity can affect drug prices" it states.
'Some evidence' is hardly a ringing endorsement of the tactic, and the claim that "there is evidence of the UK wholesale price being greater than that in continental markets" does not reflect the UKDPC's research showing falls in British street prices over the past decade.
The strategy also claims that "tough sanctions...have contributed to a fall in recorded acquisitive crime of around 20%". They refer to the flagship Drugs Intervention Programme which forces offenders into treatment.
However, my analysis suggests that such crime was falling faster before the scheme was introduced. The British Crime Survey shows that household crime in England and Wales fell 7% a year before the programme and 4% afterwards.
Today's report calls for rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of enforcement, but it seems unlikely that any government would want to question whether getting tough with drug abusers on our streets actually works.

Julian Critchley, the former director of the Cabinet Office's Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit, said Labour's "tough on drugs" approach was like "shifting the deck-chairs around on the Titanic".

He said: "The drugs strategy doesn't work, can not work, because we have no way of controlling the supply of drugs."

It comes after a report found that police and customs are fighting a losing battle against the illegal drug trade despite billions of pounds being spent every year on fighting it. Mr Critchley, who ran the Cabinet Office's Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit in the early years of the Labour Government, said a belief that drug use could be legislated away is "folly".

He said he is in "no doubt" that their legalisation would produce a fall in crime, while providing heroin addicts with the drug on prescription would stop them committing crimes to raise money to supply their habit.
Ten years ago, the Cabinet Office's Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit was at the heart of the war on drugs in the UK, co-ordinating policy across all government departments.

Keith Hellawell (CORR), the controversial former police chief who went on to accuse Labour ministers of "closing their eyes" to the drugs problem, was appointed in 1998 as the public face of the government's war on drugs.

Mr Critchley, who worked behind the scenes as the unit's director, said he had taken up his role "more or less agnostic on drugs policy, being personally opposed to drug use."

But he had become convinced that anti-drugs policy and enforcement had produced "no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs."

The only way to effectively battle the problem would be to legalise drugs and take control over their supply, he claimed.

Mr Critchley said the "overwhelming majority of professionals" he had worked with, including those from the Government, NHS, police and charities, shared his view.

"Yet publicly, all those intelligent, knowledgeable people were forced to repeat the nonsensical mantra that the government would be 'tough on drugs', even though they all knew that the government's policy was actually causing harm," he said.

Mr Critchley dismissed arguments against legalisation based on fears of an increase in drug use as "bogus".

He said: "Tobacco is a legal drug, whose use is declining, and precisely because it is legal, its users are far more amenable to government control, education programmes and taxation than they would be were it illegal.
"The idea that many people are holding back solely because of a law which they know is already unenforceable is simply ridiculous."

He recalled meetings in which "there was a very large amount of agreement that actually this drugs strategy was shifting the deckchairs around on the Titanic, we were trying to minimise harm but ultimately we knew that this was riddling while Rome burnt."

A Home Office spokesman said: "We have no intention of either decriminalising or legalising currently controlled drugs for recreational purposes.

"Drugs are controlled for good reason - they are harmful to health. Their control protects individuals and the public from the harms caused by their misuse."

"The answer lies in robust policing and sentences to catch and deter the peddlers of drugs. We also need to establish a dedicated UK Border Police to stop drugs flowing into our porous borders.

"Finally we must expand residential rehabilitation so that we can actually get addicts off drugs, in contrast to Labour's policy of simply managing addiction."

A report last month from the UK Drugs Commission found that traditional crime-fighting tactics were simply not working and that the £5.3 billion British drug market was "too fluid'' for law enforcement agencies to deal with.

In 2005-06, the Government spent £ 380 million just on reducing supply in England, the report said, while the annual cost to the criminal justice system of dealing with Class A drugs is more than £4 billion.